Swedish Reactions to the Emigration Question Around the Turn of the Century

SWEDISH REACTIONS TO THE EMIGRATION QUESTION AROUND THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
H. ARNOLD BARTON
The great Swedish emigration began in the mid-1840s and immediately aroused widespread attention. Already in 1845, when Peter Cassel led the first organized group of Swedish peasants from the Kisa area—seventeen persons in all—to America, the newspaper Najaden in Karlskrona expressed the fear that in time "hundreds" of others would follow them across the sea. In its reporting of this new and disturbing phenomenon, Östgötha Correspondenten in Linköping and its editor, C. F. Ridderstad, revealed the perplexity it caused thoughtful and conscientious observers. The newspaper did recognize the inequities that lay behind the Cassel group's decision but found emigration as such repugnant. It was described as a "mania," which "ought rather to be stemmed than encouraged." Arable land was not lacking in Sweden. The government should consider whether reforms might not be necessary to forestall emigration. To his countrymen Ridderstad made a rhetorical appeal:
Thus only dost thou leave thy homeland's strand, Because gold doth not refine itself from rock. Alone for easy bread, held in a weakling's hand, Thou fliest, frivolous, to an unknown strand
With the plow dig bread out of thy frozen land, Draw sword against the world for thy free strand!1
Ridderstad and his newspaper's reactions from 1845-46 deserve more than passing attention, since they combine in a surprisingly complete manner the most significant themes that time and again would be stated in Swedish debate over emigration until it finally ended eight decades later in the 1920s: on the one hand, patriotic indignation and dismay, and on the other, the demand for reforms to outbid the attractions of the New World.
The 1850s were a prosperous period in Sweden, which was reflected in a general optimism concerning the country's economic future. Continuing emigration, which reached a first, modest peak in 1854, when nearly 4,000 persons left the country, therefore encountered sharp criticism. It was said to be unpatriotic to betray family, community, and fatherland, that Sweden possessed great natural resources that only required labor to develop, and that the emigrant would face both perils and disappointment across the sea. The emigrant was often portrayed as either a fool or a knave. This stern judgment of America, emigration, and emigrants was reinforced during the American Civil War in 1861-1865, when many in Europe predicted the total dissolution of the young republic.2
From the mid-1860s Swedish opposition to emigration was seriously undermined. The rebellious Confederacy was defeated and the Union survived, following which America entered into a long period of explosive economic growth. The new steamship lines and expansion of the American railroad net greatly expedited immigration from Europe and a steadily growing export of grain. Times now became much harder in Sweden. The disastrous crop failures of 1867-69 drove emigration up to a previously unimaginable peak, over 32,000 in 1869. By the late 1870s the importation of cheap American grain contributed to a long crisis within Swedish agriculture, which led to even heavier emigration. In 1887 emigration reached 46,353 persons, its absolute high point. Economic stagnation coincided with widespread disappointment over the political results of the new system of representation in elections, passed by the Riksdag in 1866. Even before August Strindberg attacked contemporary Swedish society in his novel Röda rummet (The Red Room, 1879), publicists such as Johan Andersson and Alexander Nilsson had anticipated his critique in justifying emigration to America, where prosperity and justice prevailed.3 Meanwhile, the numerous Swedish journalists who visited America between 1865 and 1890—including Mauritz Rubenson (1868), Hugo Nisbeth (1874), Ernst Beckman (1877, 1883), Jonas Stadling (1880), and the fiery Isador Kjellberg (1883)—were virtually unanimous in their enthusiasm for America and admiration for their countrymen who had emigrated to the New World, which offered clear testimony regarding conditions back at home in Sweden.4
It was a difficult and discouraging time in Sweden, and there was a strong inclination to regard emigration resignedly as a deplorable necessity or at best as the incomprehensible will of Providence. The gap between Swedish and American conditions was never greater, either before or since. Still, efforts were not lacking to come to grips
E m i g r a n t s o n t h e i r way to G o t h e n b u r g . ( C o u r t e s y of Sjöfartsmuseet, Göteborg.)
with the problem. For the first time academic scholars began to turn their attention to it. The political economist W. E. Svedelius believed in 1875 that Sweden's existing population still could not be provided for within the homeland. If "a not insignificant mass of labor" left the country, "its departure does not mean that Sweden is losing what it needs, but rather that Sweden is sharing with other lands a supply that it can presently do without." As Sweden's economy developed, emigration would decline of its own accord. The economist Knut Wicksell maintained in 1882 that the raising and schooling of future emigrants cost Sweden dearly, but identified as the heart of the problem the uncontrolled growth of population and created a considerable furor by proposing birth control as the solution. In 1884-85 the young statistician Gustav Sundbärg came out with the most thorough study up to that time of the data then on hand concerning emigration, which concluded that "under present conditions" it was necessary and that "the fears that have sometimes been aroused regarding its disturbing effects upon the population structure are at least exaggerated."5
Larger landowners were meanwhile concerned over a lack of labor and rising wages in agriculture, which then faced hard competition. Quite naturally they saw emigration as above all an agrarian problem, and the practical solutions that were then proposed came mainly from that direction. Thus Axel Lindberg (1882), C. A. Sjöcrona (1882), and J. A. Leffler (1882,1982) urged large-scale public projects to increase Sweden's agricultural production through rational large-scale cultivation—which now, a century later, would seem a hopeless course in the long run. Opposition to emigration, mean­while,
by no means excluded admiration for American efficiency, and the agronomist Lindberg gave currency to what would thereafter be the constantly invoked motto of the would-be reformers, to create a new "America in Sweden."6
It was natural that the emigrants in America should feel their own need to justify their presence in the new land, both to others and to themselves. Here the editor of the newspaper Hemlandet in Chicago, Johan A. Enander, played the central role in the creation of a unique Swedish-American identity. As a bearer of the Rudbeckian and Gothicistic "Great-Swedish" tradition, he applied this to his country­men
in America by glorifying their accomplishments as worthy of their ancestors, the Vikings—the first discoverers of North Ameri­ca—
and the bold Swedish colonists on the banks of the Delaware during Sweden's seventeenth-century "Age of Greatness." The latter and their descendants he declared to have better represented the true American ideals—love of freedom, justice, and piety—than the more coldly egotistical Anglo-Americans themselves. Now there came vessels, "like the dragon ships of yore," filled with the hardy sons of the North bearing the weapons of peace to reconquer that part of "Vinland the Good" which was rightfully theirs. Enander saw it as his people's providential role to lead their new homeland toward a higher idealism. This heroic picture was intended primarily to awaken pride and self-respect among the Swedish Americans. But not lacking were intimations that they better represented their nation's past greatness than did their countrymen at home and that the Swedish Americans were therefore fully justified in criticizing what was wrong with the old country.7 A n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y c o n c e p t i o n of t h e l a n d i n g of t h e Swedes on the D e l a w a r e ( E n g r a v i ng
f r o m W. W. T h o m a s , Sweden and the Swedes [1891].)
The 1890s brought a marked change of direction in the relation­ship
between Sweden and America. In the United States the open frontier of settlement no longer existed, competition in big business hardened, working conditions deteriorated, and the whole economy was devastated by the Crash of 1893. During the same period times were good in Sweden, where the industrial sector rapidly developed. The National-Romantic movement with its strongly patriotic pathos and ideal of a great "national awakening" succeeded the gloomy resignation and skepticism of the preceding decades. Swedish travel accounts from America, in particular P. P. Waldenström's influential Genom Norra Amerikas Förenta Stater (1890), showed a new critical edge. Under these circumstances opposition to emigration hardened. It was now condemned as both unnecessary and unpatriotic, in a manner recalling the 1850s.8 Between 1894 and 1900 emigration figures declined so greatly that they gave hope to those wanting to believe that the blood-letting had finally come to an end.
By the turn of the century, the debate surrounding emigration had come to include new themes. A widespread fascination with questions of race combined old Gothicistic traditions with newer quasi-scientific theories of inherited traits of character and of a superior Germanic or "Aryan" element, which Viktor Rydberg proclaimed to be preserved in its purest form in Sweden. The idea of Sweden's national "Awakening" assumed a preceding period of decline, which was held to have begun with Charles XII's defeat at Poltava in 1709 and the end of the "Age of Greatness." Travel accounts from around the turn of the century meanwhile reveal a notable shift in attitudes toward America within opposing political camps. The United States had earlier been seen as the European working class's promised land. Now the socialist August Palm's travel account from 1901 depicted America as the new proletarian Hell. At the same time, the conservative-liberal P. P. Waldenström, following his second visit, expressed in 1902 a new respect for America's dynamic society. Henceforward America would find its warmest admirers on the political Right and its most impassioned critics on the Left. And so it remains today.9
Thus by the beginning of the twentieth century three distinctive reactions to emigration had crystallized. In Sweden a strongly emotional opposition had at first developed, followed by objective efforts to find rational explanations and solutions to the problem, while Swedish America had created its own myth of the emigrants as the true inheritors of Mother Svea's "former days of greatness."
An apparently ominous situation arose with a new wave of emigration beginning in 1900, which culminated in 1903 when over 35,000 Swedes left their native land. This seemed all the more dire from a patriotic viewpoint, since both Sweden's internal and external security appeared to be threatened by, on the one hand, the Russifica¬tion of Finland by the tsarist regime and the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian dynastic union in 1905, and, on the other, by rising class conflicts within the country itself. Under these circum­stances
all three of the aforementioned reactions to emigration revealed themselves in a national public debate that reached unprecedented proportions and that in one way or another touched upon all aspects of contemporaneous Swedish life and culture.
Most immediate and striking was the strongly emotional propa­ganda
directed against emigration from conservative quarters. Indignant attacks against the emigrants depicted them as vain seekers after purely material advantages, gullible dreamers, "deserters," and even violators of God's Sixth Commandment. Such persons, it was warmed, were destined to become rootless nomads who would never again find a firm footing in life. The moral that was preached was above all satisfaction with modest yet secure conditions in the beloved fatherland.10
E m i g r a n t s ' baggage taken to t h e s h i p in G o t h e n b u r g .
( C o u r t e s y of Sjöfartsmuseet, Göteborg.)
Meanwhile, appeals were soon heard, mainly from academic circles, for a comprehensive investigation of emigration, its causes and ways to stem its flow, under government auspices. Pontus Fahlbeck, professor of political economy in Lund, gave particular weight to this demand in an important contribution to the debate in 1903, and the statistician Gustav Sundbärg, who since his first, preliminary investigation in 1884-85 had come to the conclusion that emigration was a serious problem, strongly supported the idea.11
The third line of thought, idealization of the Swedish Americans, originally their own contribution to the debate, was introduced into Sweden in striking fashion in 1904 by the colorful Carl Sundbeck. While J. A. Enander—in Sundbeck's eyes a veritable "Styrbjörn the Strong"—presented his Swedish-American countrymen as the best and truest Americans, Sundbeck went a step further and described them as in actuality the best and truest Swedes: those stout souls who gave proof that the old Swedish spirit had not yet died out among the nation's broader masses, despite two centuries of stagnation under weak and decadent leadership. They showed the "lust for mighty deeds, the yearning for what is gigantic, great, and danger­ous,"
which characterized their forefathers. Where they advanced as a peaceful host across America's vast expanse, "their horses trampled the grass here, not as in an enemy land, nonetheless as in a con­quered
one." Sundbeck held forth the ideal of a "national" imperial­ism,
"to be sure not directly of a political nature, yet containing within itself all the postulates of political significance," based upon a union of all Swedes throughout the world. Thanks to the Swedish Americans, Sweden's name ranked "no more among the small nations. As of yore Thy name means greatness and power." In courage, hardiness, and loyalty to the old Swedish values, the Swedish folk was best represented west of the Atlantic, from whence inspiration and examples for a sound national awakening in the homeland would come. Thereafter it should no longer be necessary for ambitious Swedes to feel the need to seek broader horizons beyond Sweden's borders.12
During the first half of 1907, all three currents in the debate gave rise to organized responses to the question of emigration. Already in January 1904 motions had been made in the Riksdag by both the conservative and liberal camps for the appointment of a government commission to investigate the problem. After the proposition had been approved by the legislative process, the Emigration Inquest (Emigrationsutredningen) commenced its work in the winter of 1907 under the leadership of Gustav Sundbärg. Both he and his most active collaborators represented a reforming liberalism that accepted modern industry as the only realistic basis for subsequent material prosperity and the far-reaching social welfare policy that was needed in Sweden to bring mass emigration to an end. But while Sundbärg himself was most concerned with industrial development, certain of his colleagues, such as G. H. von Koch and E. H. Thörnberg, regarded the inquest primarily as a lever to bring about desirable social reforms, as Thörnberg freely admitted in later years.13 Mean-while Sundbärg took advantage of the inquest as an opportunity to present his celebrated reflections on the "Swedish national character," whose grandiose "fantasy," lukewarm national sentiment, weakness for all things foreign, envy, and lack of psychological insight he saw, behind all the statistics, as the basic root of the problem. He thus gave vent to his own growing irritability through sharp criticism of his own countrymen as well as of the neighboring Danes and Norwegians.14
In some circles feelings on emigration ran so high that they could hardly be placated by a time-consuming official investigation. In 1906 a certain C. Thorborg in Karlstad wrote that the emigration question "constitutes the nation's 'to be or not to be.'" Already before the Emigration Inquest began its work, he predicted that the data it collected would simply end up in the archives. "In truth an excellent way to cure this ruinous emigration!"
It is just as though they thought that emigration would stop because it was decided by the highest authority to seek out its causes. . . . But knowing the Royal Swedish Slowness, one is not going too far to maintain that hundreds of thousands of Sweden's sons and daughters will still leave the fatherland before anything is officially done to cure the epidemic of emigration.'5
Thorborg gave voice to the sentiments that lay behind the second organized response to the emigration question: the founding of the National Society Against Emigration (Nationalföreningen mot emigrationen) in May 1907. "National" in its title emphasized a widely felt need for the broadest possible coalition of all classes and political viewpoints to confront the common threat. The society was nonethe­less
dominated from the beginning by an inner circle of conservative businessmen, landowners, and intellectuals, above all from the Gothenburg area. Its leading figure was Adrian Molin, director of the society, who focused its activities principally upon support of the Egna hem or "Own-Home" movement, propaganda against emigration, and encouragement of remigration to the homeland. As a spokesman for the "Young Right," Molin polemicized against an alleged gerontocracy that prevented youthful idealism from creating a new Swedish "Age of Greatness." During a visit to the United States in 1910, he expressed his admiration for American optimism and drive and recognized that the Old World had much to learn from the New. Molin's and his colleagues' prescriptions to stem the flow of emigration and for the future of Sweden were nonetheless diametri­cally
opposed to those of Gustav Sundbärg and his liberal circle in the Emigration Inquest. Rather than a modern industrialized and urbanized community, Molin and his supporters envisioned a rejuvenated agrarian society that would be realized by creating the largest possible number of smallholdings. The National Society thus contributed greatly, both financially and morally, to the "Own-Home" movement.16
Molin's and the National Society's national-romantic vision of their country's ideal future is most clearly presented in Svenska allmogehem, edited by Gustaf Carlsson in 1911, which was printed and reprinted in impressively large editions. 'To be Swedish is to be part of Sweden," Adrian Molin wrote in its introduction.
We Swedes, all of us, have our roots in the soil of Sweden. And these roots cannot be cut without doing damage to our soul. . . . And ever stronger goes forth the appeal: back to the land! It is a matter of showing that just as in our fathers' times the soil of our country can provide both a secure and a good livelihood to its cultivators and that it can sustain good and happy homes.17
Because of rising wages for hired farm labor around the turn of the century, many believed—among them Molin and certain of his friends—that large-scale farming was becoming unprofitable and that small family farms, utilizing intensive methods of cultivation, were the way of the future for Swedish agriculture. But more important still: a stable rural population, firmly rooted in homes on land of its own, would remain untouched by seductive temptations from across the sea or from the international socialist and labor movements, which appeared to threaten the very fabric of society.
Despite the notable accomplishments of the National Society, the "Own-Home" movement was administered mainly by the old provincial agrarian economic societies (lanthushållningssällskap), supported by subsidies granted by the Riksdag in 1904, which in practice meant that they encouraged homes primarily for agricultural laborers rather than self-sufficient smallholding farmers. As a private interest group the National Society meanwhile had an undisputed field of activity in publicity and propaganda. Besides Svenska allmogehem, it also published a series of pamphlets and brochures, in addition
t
o sponsoring extensive lecture series directed against emigration throughout the country. The basic message is consistently the same: America is no longer the El Dorado it once was; its economy is stagnating and devastated by repeated crises that cause widespread unemployment and misery; extremely few emigrants nowadays succeed; even so, Swedish Americans persist, through misdirected pride, in boasting about their alleged success and thereby luring others to their ruin, while nothing is heard of the thousands upon thousands who fail; meanwhile the new Sweden offers abundant opportunities for all of its sons and daughters who are prepared to work.18 A number of individual publicists were inspired to direct their own attacks against emigration, and these generally reflect the same arguments. A special case is provided by G. Thyreen, who in 1911 warned against the decline of civilization itself because of Europe's catastrophic loss of pure Germanic blood—of which its Swedish strain was the purest—to North America, the grave of the white race.19
A meeting held at Stockholm's Grand Hotel in January 1907 prepared the ground for the third organized response to emigration: the Society for the Preservation of Swedish Culture in Foreign Lands (Riksföreningen för svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet), formally estab­lished
in December 1908 with its headquarters in Gothenburg. As had been the case both in the Emigration Inquest and in the National Society Against Emigration, the RFSBU also had its dominating personality, Vilhelm Lundström, one-time editor of the conservative newspaper Göteborgs Aftonblad, professor of classical languages at Gothenburg University, and in 1914 a conservative member of the Riksdag. Lundström deplored emigration as deeply as either Gustav Sundbärg or Adrian Molin, but if it was Sweden's tragedy, he also regarded it as the fatherland's great opportunity. As he later expressed it, he was seized by
an overpowering sense of duty to preserve, in a national sense, what could be saved, to seek to turn to account all that noble Swedish material which, even if no longer here at home in the fatherland, nonetheless still belongs through blood and race, through language and heritage, to the Swedish nationality.20
The solution he found in what he called the "All-Swedish idea." Beyond the limited Swedish national state there existed "another, greater fatherland," consisting of everyone of Swedish race, culture, and language throughout the world. Of a total nine million Swedes, Lundström maintained, three million lived outside of Sweden. The ancient Swedish minorities across the Baltic—in Finland, Estonia, and even Gammalsvenskby in remote southern Russia—provided moving examples of loyalty toward their cultural heritage for the Swedes of the more recent diaspora, above all for those in America. Swedes throughout the world should join together in one great union based upon common material and cultural interests.
The union of all Swedes [Allsvensk samling]—does it not ring forth like a fanfare? . . . It is a fanfare for struggle and con­quest.
For the rallying in spirit of the greater Swedish father­land
once again is a conquest, surely the last old Sweden can make. But also the greatest it has ever made.21
V i l h e l m Lundström, 1 8 6 9 - 1 9 4 0 . ( C o u r t e s y of Riksföreningen S v e r i g e k o n t a k t , Göteborg.)
The similarity between Lundström's all-Swedish ideal and Carl Sundbeck's proposal in 1904 concerning a new, non-political imperialism is unmistakable, even though Sundbeck, who soon found other outlets for his restless crusading spirit, does not appear to have played any active role in the RFSBU. A similar presentation of Swedish Americans as examples for those in the homeland of venerable, time-honored Swedish values and characteristics, appears in the account that Gothenburg pastor Per Pehrsson wrote of his visit to the United States in 1910 on behalf of RFSBU, to congratulate Augustana College and Seminary—that bastion of Swedish culture on the banks of the Mississippi—during the fiftieth anniversary of their founding. This visit resulted the same year in the establishment of a Swedish-American offshoot, the Society for the Preservation of Swedish Culture in America, later renamed the Swedish Cultural Society of America.22
All three of the organized responses to the emigration question at the beginning of the twentieth century showed, despite their obvious differences, certain common characteristics. All considered emigra­tion
to be deplorable, even if Lundström and the RFSBU concentrated on utilizing this fait accompli to Sweden's and the Swedish nationality's advantage. No insurmountable contradictions separated the three lines of thought, and a number of leading personalities were associated with more than one of them. All belonged to the conser­vative
or liberal political camps, which at the same time opposed emigration while admiring America as a land of progress. All were at least as concerned about socialism and the labor movement as they were about emigration. As opposed to both, they upheld their own ideal of a "national awakening" based upon the patriotic rallying of all classes of society around the blue and gold banner. Both emigration and socialism threatened this vision of the future, but its proponents cherished certain hopes that the one evil might counteract the other if only a sufficient number of energetic and capable Swedish Americans, possessing both capital and useful skills, as well as exemplary American ideas of individual success through hard work, could be persuaded to return to their old homeland and thereby strengthen the forces of social preservation.23
What came of the three organized responses' efforts? The Emigration Inquest lasted only for a limited time, until its task was completed. The result was a hefty report, augmented by twenty weighty supplements, which came out between 1908 and 1913, when the commission was dissolved. These documents contain a series of specific recommendations, mainly economic in nature; but these became largely irrelevant after the outbreak of World War I already in 1914 and thereafter when the American quota laws of the 1920s reduced emigration to a mere trickle.24 Nonetheless, the total impression created by the Emigration Inquest, in particular upon politicians, public officials, and shapers of public opinion, must have been considerable with regard to Sweden's future development. And indeed Sweden has followed the guidelines that Sundbärg and his colleagues espoused: modern industrialization and an advanced social welfare system. Meanwhile the inquest assembled an unparalleled mass of documentary material with a wealth of statistical data for research on Swedish life and history around the turn of the century. Undoubtedly this has played a significant part in creating a strongly statistical tendency within Swedish historical scholarship in our own time.
The National Society Against Emigration reached its peak in 1917 during World War I, when it counted nearly 16,000 members and had offices and "Own-Home" associations throughout the country. With declining emigration, its membership fell off rapidly, until only some 2,000 remained in 1925. It then changed its focus and name to the Society for Homes in Sweden (Sällskapet hem i Sverige), which now was devoted entirely to real estate transactions, still under Adrian Molin's direction.25 There meanwhile remains the question of the National Society's effectiveness between 1907 and 1925. Its propagan­da
activities, which far surpassed in scale all that had been done previously in that regard in Sweden, must have had a considerable total effect by criticizing America and emigration as such, while holding forth the vision of a more attractive future in the homeland, even if it could stir up strong reactions both in Sweden and in Swedish America. This cannot, of course, be measured. Meanwhile, one may ask, as the journalist M. V. Wester did in 1913, whether the National Society ought not to have concentrated entirely upon this side of its program. Wester maintained that its leadership, unfamiliar with practical farming, underwrote the purchase of many homes and smallholdings that soon proved to have been poorly planned and infeasible, which led to further emigration. Through its involvement in land sales Wester maintained, "idealism suffers seriously and the ['Own-Home'] movement becomes somehow artificial."26 It may nonetheless be asked whether the National Society's land transactions still did not serve their purpose to the extent that they at least kept a sizable number of potential emigrants in Sweden until emigration no longer seemed a suitable option and the homeland could offer better alternatives. By the time World War I broke out in 1914, the Society for the Preservation of Swedish Culture in Foreign Lands was the least developed of the organized responses. Its activities concerning the United States thereafter encountered repeated misunderstandings and conflicts. These resulted largely from Vilhelm Lundström's inability to grasp fundamental differences between the highly admired Swedish folk elements across the Baltic, with their ancient traditions of cultural preservation, and the Swedes who of their own choice had emigrated to North America, where similar traditions were weak and assimilation relatively easy. His constant appeals for the unwavering maintenance of the Swedish heritage and language, even in the midst of America's involvement in the war, seemed nagging and tiresome to Swedish Americans, who also reacted adversely to the kind of cultural imperialism that these appeals seemed to express. In time Lundström became more tolerant, especially after he himself finally visited America in 1938 and encountered the unforced, natural Swedish culture that despite all still lived on here.27
Nevertheless it was the RFSBU that survived longest among the organized responses from 1907; it lives on today, since 1979 under the name, the Society for Contact with Sweden (Riksföreningen Sverigekontakt), with its headquarters still in Gothenburg. From the beginning, it aimed not only at supporting Swedish culture among the Swedes outside of Sweden but also at spreading knowledge of Swedish language and culture to a broader cultivated public throughout the world. In this respect the RFSBU has had a consider­able
impact over the years, supported in the United States by such organizations as the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, both founded in 1910, as well as in Sweden by Sverige-Amerika Stiftelsen (the Sweden-America Foundation, 1919), Utlandssvenskarnas förening (the Society of Swedes Abroad, 1938), and Svenska Institutet (the Swedish Institute, 1945). Familiarity with literary Swedish and higher Swedish culture can hardly have been ever much greater in America than it is today, and this among a broader and by no means entirely Swedish-descended public.
Following a final wave of nearly 25,000 emigrants in 1923, mainly reflecting the restraints of the war years, Swedish emigration declined to relatively insignificant numbers. From the mid-1920s the Swedes have rarely even filled their national quotas set by Congress. From the Depression of the 1930s until 1946, return migration to Sweden was far greater than emigration. Since then they have more or less balanced out.
As the Great Migration drew to a close a new view of it became evident in Sweden. Now, when it no longer represented a threat, it could be hailed as a heroic episode in the history of the Swedish people. Just as the vanishing Wild West was glorified in America, the fearless Swedish pioneers "over there" became a partially still living legend. This new appreciation, echoing the Swedish American Enander and the Swede Sundbeck, is manifest in Archbishop Nathan Söderblom's and his wife Anna's accounts of their visit to America in 1923 as well as in the handsome collaborative work, Svenskarna i Amerika (The Swedes in America), brought out in two volumes in 1925-26 by Karl Hildebrand and Axel Fredenholm. The same tradition was carried on by Albin Widén and Nils Jacobsson during the 1930s and reached its solemn apotheosis during the celebration in 1938 of the 300th anniversary of the founding of the New Sweden colony, with official Swedish representation headed by Crown Prince Gustav Adolf.28 It eventually received its most striking expression in fictional form in Vilhelm Moberg's epic tetralogy of novels Utvandrarna (The Emigrants, 1949-1959). Almost immediately thereafter, around 1960, academic research on the Great Migration began at Swedish universities, particularly at Uppsala with Professor Sten Carlsson in the lead.29
Meanwhile, in America, as the Swedish-born immigrant generation has largely disappeared, the Swedish connection has become ever more a matter of ethnicity by choice, a concept officially endorsed for the first time by the 1980 United States census, in which every individual was free to indicate the ethnic group with which he or she felt most closely associated, irrespective of other ancestry. There nonetheless still remains a surprising amount of the old ethnicity, as well as a warm attachment to the old homeland, among the descen­dants
of those who were part of the great Swedish emigration that aroused such strong reactions in the old homeland.
NOTES
1 George M. Stephenson, ed. and trans., "Documents Relating to Peter Cassel and the Settlement at New Sweden," Swedish American Historical Bulletin, 2:1 (1929), 16-18; Nils Runeby, Den nya världen och den gamla. Amerikabild och emigrationsuppfattning i Sverige 1820-1860 (Uppsala, 1969), 203. Cf. Peter Cassel, Beskrifning öfver Norra Amerikas Förenta Stater (Westerwik, 1846), included in both the original Swedish and in English translation in Stephenson, "Documents." 2 See Runeby, Den nya världen och den gamla. Cf., for ex., also C A. von Nolcken, "Några ord om Swenska Allmogens utflyttning till andra werldsdelar," Läsning för Allmogen (Lund, 1855), 37-48; Ph. v. T., "Varningsord till Utvandrare," Läsning för Folket, 25:3 (1859), 286-88; "Warning för Utwandrare," Läsning för Folket, 28:1 (1863), 60-72; Kjell Bondestad, "The American Civil War and Swedish Public Opinion," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 19 (1968), 95-115.
3 Johan Andersson, Amerika eller Sverige? (Kalmar, 1870); Alex. Nilsson, Amerika sådant det är! (Stockholm, 1871).
4 Mauritz Rubenson Skildringar från Amerika och England i bref under hösten 1867 (Stockholm, 1868); Hugo Nisbeth, Två år i Amerika (1872-1874) (Stockholm, 1874); Ernst Beckman, Frän Nya Verlden (Stockholm, 1877) and Amerikanska studier, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1883), I; Jonas Stadling, Genom den stora Vestern (Stockholm, 1883); Isador Kjellberg, Föredrag om Amerika (Stockholm, 1883).
5 W. E. Svedelius, Studier i Sveriges statskunskap, I (Uppsala, 1875), 351-413, esp. 390; Knut Wicksell, Om utvandringen (Stockholm, 1882); Gustav Sundbärg, Bidrag till utvandringsfrågan från befolkningsstatistisk synpunkt, 2 vols. (Uppsala, 1884-85), esp. II, 138.
6 Axel Lindberg, Några betraktelser rörande främjandet af landets jordbruk och hämmandet af emigrationen (Uppsala, 1882); C. A. Sjöcrona, Om utwandringen. Utlåtande afgifvet på nådig befallning (Mariestad, 1882); J. A. Leffler, "Våra jordbruksarbetare med särskildt afseende på den amerikanska konkurensen," Nationalekonomiska Föreningens förhandlingar 1887,49-62, and "Om utvandringen," Nationalekonomiska Föreningens förhandlingar 1890, 49-58.
7 Joh. A. Enander, Förenta Staternas Historia utarbetad pr den Svenska befolkningen i Amerika, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1882); Valda skrifter af Joh. A. Enander, I (Chicago, 1892); Joh. A. Enander, "Svensk-Amerikas dag i Norrköping," Prärieblomman 1907, 69-90; Anders Schön, "Dr. Joh. A. Enander. En minnesruna," Prärieblomman 1911, 16-45.
8 P. P. Waldenström, Genom Norra Amerikas Förenta Stater (Stockholm, 1890); see also "C. J. U." [C. J. Malmquist], Hvilket lands folk är månne det lyckligaste? (Örebro, 1894); Vilhelm Nordin, Ur en emigrants anteckningsbok (Stockholm, 1902).
9 August Palm, Ögonblicksbilder från en tripp till Amerika (Stockholm, 1901); P. P. Waldenström, Nya färder i Amerikas Förenta Stater (Stockholm, 1902). Cf. Sigmund Skard, "Amerika i Europas liv," in Lars Öhnebrinck, ed., Amerika och Norden (Stockholm, Göteborg & Uppsala, 1964), 19-20.
10 See, for ex., F. A. Wingborg, Emigrationen. Några erinringar (Stockholm, 1903, and later editions); Några råd till dem som ämna utvandra till Amerika (Göteborg, 1903).
11 Pontus Fahlbeck, "Emigrationen. Dess orsaker och medlen att stäfja den," Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift (1903), 13 pp.; Gustav Sundbärg, Emigrationen (Uppsala, 1906), 23 pp., and Emigrationen II (Uppsala, 1907), 34 pp.
12 Carl Sundbeck, Svensk-amerikanerna. Deras materiella och andliga sträfvanden (Rock Island, Ill., 1904), esp. 34, 92, and Svensk-Amerika lefve! Några tal hållna i Amerika (Stockholm, 1904, esp. 23, 26, 29.
13 See Ann-Sofie Kälvemark, Reaktionen mot utvandringen. Emigrationsfrågan i svensk debatt och politik 1901-1904 (Uppsala, 1972), esp. 182.
14 Emigrationsutredningen. Bilaga XVI (Stockholm, 1911), also published separately as Det svenska folklynnet (Stockholm, 1911). Cf. Kristian Hvidt, "Scandinavian Discord on Emigration," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 25 (1974), 254-63.
15 C. Thornberg, Emigrationsfrågan studerad hemma och i Amerika (Karlstad, 1906), esp. 5-7. 16 For Molin's ideas, see esp. his Svenska spårsmål och kraf (Stockholm, 1906) and Vanhäfd (Stockholm, 1911).
17 Gustaf Carlsson, ed., Svenska allmogehem (Stockholm, 1909), esp. 7,11,14. Cf. Michael Shepard, "The Romantic, Rural Orientation of the National Society Against Emigration," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 21 (1970), 69-83.
18 See, for ex., [T. W. Schönberg], Sanningen om Amerika (Stockholm, 1909); [W. Swanston Howard], När Maja-Lisa kom hem frän Amerika (Stockholm, 1908); [Ernst Lindblom], Per Jansons Amerikaresa (Stockholm, 1909).
19 [M.], Hvad Anders lärde i Amerika (Stockholm, 1907); Carl Bruhn, Stanna hemma! Amerikanska penndrag (Stockholm, 1916); G. Thyreen, Skall jag resa till Amerika? (Stockholm, 1911).
20 "Riksföreningens förhistoria," Riksföreningen för svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet. Årsbok 1909 (Göteborg, 1909), 1-9; Vilhelm Lundström, "Kring svenskar, svenskhet och svensk-minnen i U.S.A," in Till trettioårsdagen 1908 3/XII 1938 (Göteborg, 1938), 8. Cf. Bengt Bogärde, Vilhelm Lundström och svenskheten (Göteborg, 1992); my "Vilhelm Lundström och svenskarna i Väster- och österled," Sverigekontakt (December, 1991), 17,19.
21 Vilhelm Lundström, Allsvenska linjer (Göteborg, 1930), 3.
22 Per Pehrsson, "Svenskheten i Amerika," Riksföreningen pr svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet. Årsbok 1910 (Göteborg, 1910), 1-40.
23 See Nils Runeby, "Herman Lagerkrantz, emigrationen och den nationella väckelsen," Arkivvetenskapliga studier, 3 (1962), 63-84.
24 See Franklin D. Scott, "Sweden's Constructive Opposition to Emigration," Journal of Modern History, 37 (1965), 316.
25 See Paul Bergholm, Nationalföreningen mot emigrationen 1907-1917 (Stockholm, 1917); Scott, "Sweden's Constructive Opposition," 318-19, 331-32.
26 M. V. Wester, Småbruksrörelsen pr eller mot emigrationen (Stockholm, 1913), esp. 22-26.
27 George M. Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration (Minneapolis, 1932), 449-57; Lundström, "Kring svenskar."
28 See Nathan Söderblom, Från Uppsala till Rock Island (Stockholm, 1924); Anna Söderblom, En Amerikabok (Stockholm, 1925); Karl Hildebrand & Axel Fredenholm, eds., Svenskarna i Amerika, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1925-26); Albin Widén, Svenskar som erövrat Amerika (Stockholm, 1937); Nils Jacobsson, Svenska öden vid Delaware 1638-1831 (Stockholm, 1938).
29 The Uppsala group's research is summarized in Ann-Sofie Kälvemark, ed., Utvandring (Stockholm, 1973) and in Harald Runblom & Hans Norman, eds., From Sweden to America: A History of the Migration (Uppsala & Minneapolis, 1976). Cf. H. Arnold Barton, "Clio and Swedish America," in Nils Hasselmo, ed., Perspectives on Swedish Immigration (Chicago & Duluth, 1978), 3-24.
This article appeared in
Studie
r i modern historia tillägnade Jarl Torbacke den 18 augusti 1990 (Stockholm, 1990), 13-25, under the title "Svenska reaktioner till utvandringsfrågan kring sekelskiftet." It is here translated by the author with only a few minor revisions.

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SWEDISH REACTIONS TO THE EMIGRATION QUESTION AROUND THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
H. ARNOLD BARTON
The great Swedish emigration began in the mid-1840s and immediately aroused widespread attention. Already in 1845, when Peter Cassel led the first organized group of Swedish peasants from the Kisa area—seventeen persons in all—to America, the newspaper Najaden in Karlskrona expressed the fear that in time "hundreds" of others would follow them across the sea. In its reporting of this new and disturbing phenomenon, Östgötha Correspondenten in Linköping and its editor, C. F. Ridderstad, revealed the perplexity it caused thoughtful and conscientious observers. The newspaper did recognize the inequities that lay behind the Cassel group's decision but found emigration as such repugnant. It was described as a "mania," which "ought rather to be stemmed than encouraged." Arable land was not lacking in Sweden. The government should consider whether reforms might not be necessary to forestall emigration. To his countrymen Ridderstad made a rhetorical appeal:
Thus only dost thou leave thy homeland's strand, Because gold doth not refine itself from rock. Alone for easy bread, held in a weakling's hand, Thou fliest, frivolous, to an unknown strand
With the plow dig bread out of thy frozen land, Draw sword against the world for thy free strand!1
Ridderstad and his newspaper's reactions from 1845-46 deserve more than passing attention, since they combine in a surprisingly complete manner the most significant themes that time and again would be stated in Swedish debate over emigration until it finally ended eight decades later in the 1920s: on the one hand, patriotic indignation and dismay, and on the other, the demand for reforms to outbid the attractions of the New World.
The 1850s were a prosperous period in Sweden, which was reflected in a general optimism concerning the country's economic future. Continuing emigration, which reached a first, modest peak in 1854, when nearly 4,000 persons left the country, therefore encountered sharp criticism. It was said to be unpatriotic to betray family, community, and fatherland, that Sweden possessed great natural resources that only required labor to develop, and that the emigrant would face both perils and disappointment across the sea. The emigrant was often portrayed as either a fool or a knave. This stern judgment of America, emigration, and emigrants was reinforced during the American Civil War in 1861-1865, when many in Europe predicted the total dissolution of the young republic.2
From the mid-1860s Swedish opposition to emigration was seriously undermined. The rebellious Confederacy was defeated and the Union survived, following which America entered into a long period of explosive economic growth. The new steamship lines and expansion of the American railroad net greatly expedited immigration from Europe and a steadily growing export of grain. Times now became much harder in Sweden. The disastrous crop failures of 1867-69 drove emigration up to a previously unimaginable peak, over 32,000 in 1869. By the late 1870s the importation of cheap American grain contributed to a long crisis within Swedish agriculture, which led to even heavier emigration. In 1887 emigration reached 46,353 persons, its absolute high point. Economic stagnation coincided with widespread disappointment over the political results of the new system of representation in elections, passed by the Riksdag in 1866. Even before August Strindberg attacked contemporary Swedish society in his novel Röda rummet (The Red Room, 1879), publicists such as Johan Andersson and Alexander Nilsson had anticipated his critique in justifying emigration to America, where prosperity and justice prevailed.3 Meanwhile, the numerous Swedish journalists who visited America between 1865 and 1890—including Mauritz Rubenson (1868), Hugo Nisbeth (1874), Ernst Beckman (1877, 1883), Jonas Stadling (1880), and the fiery Isador Kjellberg (1883)—were virtually unanimous in their enthusiasm for America and admiration for their countrymen who had emigrated to the New World, which offered clear testimony regarding conditions back at home in Sweden.4
It was a difficult and discouraging time in Sweden, and there was a strong inclination to regard emigration resignedly as a deplorable necessity or at best as the incomprehensible will of Providence. The gap between Swedish and American conditions was never greater, either before or since. Still, efforts were not lacking to come to grips
E m i g r a n t s o n t h e i r way to G o t h e n b u r g . ( C o u r t e s y of Sjöfartsmuseet, Göteborg.)
with the problem. For the first time academic scholars began to turn their attention to it. The political economist W. E. Svedelius believed in 1875 that Sweden's existing population still could not be provided for within the homeland. If "a not insignificant mass of labor" left the country, "its departure does not mean that Sweden is losing what it needs, but rather that Sweden is sharing with other lands a supply that it can presently do without." As Sweden's economy developed, emigration would decline of its own accord. The economist Knut Wicksell maintained in 1882 that the raising and schooling of future emigrants cost Sweden dearly, but identified as the heart of the problem the uncontrolled growth of population and created a considerable furor by proposing birth control as the solution. In 1884-85 the young statistician Gustav Sundbärg came out with the most thorough study up to that time of the data then on hand concerning emigration, which concluded that "under present conditions" it was necessary and that "the fears that have sometimes been aroused regarding its disturbing effects upon the population structure are at least exaggerated."5
Larger landowners were meanwhile concerned over a lack of labor and rising wages in agriculture, which then faced hard competition. Quite naturally they saw emigration as above all an agrarian problem, and the practical solutions that were then proposed came mainly from that direction. Thus Axel Lindberg (1882), C. A. Sjöcrona (1882), and J. A. Leffler (1882,1982) urged large-scale public projects to increase Sweden's agricultural production through rational large-scale cultivation—which now, a century later, would seem a hopeless course in the long run. Opposition to emigration, mean­while,
by no means excluded admiration for American efficiency, and the agronomist Lindberg gave currency to what would thereafter be the constantly invoked motto of the would-be reformers, to create a new "America in Sweden."6
It was natural that the emigrants in America should feel their own need to justify their presence in the new land, both to others and to themselves. Here the editor of the newspaper Hemlandet in Chicago, Johan A. Enander, played the central role in the creation of a unique Swedish-American identity. As a bearer of the Rudbeckian and Gothicistic "Great-Swedish" tradition, he applied this to his country­men
in America by glorifying their accomplishments as worthy of their ancestors, the Vikings—the first discoverers of North Ameri­ca—
and the bold Swedish colonists on the banks of the Delaware during Sweden's seventeenth-century "Age of Greatness." The latter and their descendants he declared to have better represented the true American ideals—love of freedom, justice, and piety—than the more coldly egotistical Anglo-Americans themselves. Now there came vessels, "like the dragon ships of yore," filled with the hardy sons of the North bearing the weapons of peace to reconquer that part of "Vinland the Good" which was rightfully theirs. Enander saw it as his people's providential role to lead their new homeland toward a higher idealism. This heroic picture was intended primarily to awaken pride and self-respect among the Swedish Americans. But not lacking were intimations that they better represented their nation's past greatness than did their countrymen at home and that the Swedish Americans were therefore fully justified in criticizing what was wrong with the old country.7 A n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y c o n c e p t i o n of t h e l a n d i n g of t h e Swedes on the D e l a w a r e ( E n g r a v i ng
f r o m W. W. T h o m a s , Sweden and the Swedes [1891].)
The 1890s brought a marked change of direction in the relation­ship
between Sweden and America. In the United States the open frontier of settlement no longer existed, competition in big business hardened, working conditions deteriorated, and the whole economy was devastated by the Crash of 1893. During the same period times were good in Sweden, where the industrial sector rapidly developed. The National-Romantic movement with its strongly patriotic pathos and ideal of a great "national awakening" succeeded the gloomy resignation and skepticism of the preceding decades. Swedish travel accounts from America, in particular P. P. Waldenström's influential Genom Norra Amerikas Förenta Stater (1890), showed a new critical edge. Under these circumstances opposition to emigration hardened. It was now condemned as both unnecessary and unpatriotic, in a manner recalling the 1850s.8 Between 1894 and 1900 emigration figures declined so greatly that they gave hope to those wanting to believe that the blood-letting had finally come to an end.
By the turn of the century, the debate surrounding emigration had come to include new themes. A widespread fascination with questions of race combined old Gothicistic traditions with newer quasi-scientific theories of inherited traits of character and of a superior Germanic or "Aryan" element, which Viktor Rydberg proclaimed to be preserved in its purest form in Sweden. The idea of Sweden's national "Awakening" assumed a preceding period of decline, which was held to have begun with Charles XII's defeat at Poltava in 1709 and the end of the "Age of Greatness." Travel accounts from around the turn of the century meanwhile reveal a notable shift in attitudes toward America within opposing political camps. The United States had earlier been seen as the European working class's promised land. Now the socialist August Palm's travel account from 1901 depicted America as the new proletarian Hell. At the same time, the conservative-liberal P. P. Waldenström, following his second visit, expressed in 1902 a new respect for America's dynamic society. Henceforward America would find its warmest admirers on the political Right and its most impassioned critics on the Left. And so it remains today.9
Thus by the beginning of the twentieth century three distinctive reactions to emigration had crystallized. In Sweden a strongly emotional opposition had at first developed, followed by objective efforts to find rational explanations and solutions to the problem, while Swedish America had created its own myth of the emigrants as the true inheritors of Mother Svea's "former days of greatness."
An apparently ominous situation arose with a new wave of emigration beginning in 1900, which culminated in 1903 when over 35,000 Swedes left their native land. This seemed all the more dire from a patriotic viewpoint, since both Sweden's internal and external security appeared to be threatened by, on the one hand, the Russifica¬tion of Finland by the tsarist regime and the dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian dynastic union in 1905, and, on the other, by rising class conflicts within the country itself. Under these circum­stances
all three of the aforementioned reactions to emigration revealed themselves in a national public debate that reached unprecedented proportions and that in one way or another touched upon all aspects of contemporaneous Swedish life and culture.
Most immediate and striking was the strongly emotional propa­ganda
directed against emigration from conservative quarters. Indignant attacks against the emigrants depicted them as vain seekers after purely material advantages, gullible dreamers, "deserters," and even violators of God's Sixth Commandment. Such persons, it was warmed, were destined to become rootless nomads who would never again find a firm footing in life. The moral that was preached was above all satisfaction with modest yet secure conditions in the beloved fatherland.10
E m i g r a n t s ' baggage taken to t h e s h i p in G o t h e n b u r g .
( C o u r t e s y of Sjöfartsmuseet, Göteborg.)
Meanwhile, appeals were soon heard, mainly from academic circles, for a comprehensive investigation of emigration, its causes and ways to stem its flow, under government auspices. Pontus Fahlbeck, professor of political economy in Lund, gave particular weight to this demand in an important contribution to the debate in 1903, and the statistician Gustav Sundbärg, who since his first, preliminary investigation in 1884-85 had come to the conclusion that emigration was a serious problem, strongly supported the idea.11
The third line of thought, idealization of the Swedish Americans, originally their own contribution to the debate, was introduced into Sweden in striking fashion in 1904 by the colorful Carl Sundbeck. While J. A. Enander—in Sundbeck's eyes a veritable "Styrbjörn the Strong"—presented his Swedish-American countrymen as the best and truest Americans, Sundbeck went a step further and described them as in actuality the best and truest Swedes: those stout souls who gave proof that the old Swedish spirit had not yet died out among the nation's broader masses, despite two centuries of stagnation under weak and decadent leadership. They showed the "lust for mighty deeds, the yearning for what is gigantic, great, and danger­ous,"
which characterized their forefathers. Where they advanced as a peaceful host across America's vast expanse, "their horses trampled the grass here, not as in an enemy land, nonetheless as in a con­quered
one." Sundbeck held forth the ideal of a "national" imperial­ism,
"to be sure not directly of a political nature, yet containing within itself all the postulates of political significance," based upon a union of all Swedes throughout the world. Thanks to the Swedish Americans, Sweden's name ranked "no more among the small nations. As of yore Thy name means greatness and power." In courage, hardiness, and loyalty to the old Swedish values, the Swedish folk was best represented west of the Atlantic, from whence inspiration and examples for a sound national awakening in the homeland would come. Thereafter it should no longer be necessary for ambitious Swedes to feel the need to seek broader horizons beyond Sweden's borders.12
During the first half of 1907, all three currents in the debate gave rise to organized responses to the question of emigration. Already in January 1904 motions had been made in the Riksdag by both the conservative and liberal camps for the appointment of a government commission to investigate the problem. After the proposition had been approved by the legislative process, the Emigration Inquest (Emigrationsutredningen) commenced its work in the winter of 1907 under the leadership of Gustav Sundbärg. Both he and his most active collaborators represented a reforming liberalism that accepted modern industry as the only realistic basis for subsequent material prosperity and the far-reaching social welfare policy that was needed in Sweden to bring mass emigration to an end. But while Sundbärg himself was most concerned with industrial development, certain of his colleagues, such as G. H. von Koch and E. H. Thörnberg, regarded the inquest primarily as a lever to bring about desirable social reforms, as Thörnberg freely admitted in later years.13 Mean-while Sundbärg took advantage of the inquest as an opportunity to present his celebrated reflections on the "Swedish national character," whose grandiose "fantasy," lukewarm national sentiment, weakness for all things foreign, envy, and lack of psychological insight he saw, behind all the statistics, as the basic root of the problem. He thus gave vent to his own growing irritability through sharp criticism of his own countrymen as well as of the neighboring Danes and Norwegians.14
In some circles feelings on emigration ran so high that they could hardly be placated by a time-consuming official investigation. In 1906 a certain C. Thorborg in Karlstad wrote that the emigration question "constitutes the nation's 'to be or not to be.'" Already before the Emigration Inquest began its work, he predicted that the data it collected would simply end up in the archives. "In truth an excellent way to cure this ruinous emigration!"
It is just as though they thought that emigration would stop because it was decided by the highest authority to seek out its causes. . . . But knowing the Royal Swedish Slowness, one is not going too far to maintain that hundreds of thousands of Sweden's sons and daughters will still leave the fatherland before anything is officially done to cure the epidemic of emigration.'5
Thorborg gave voice to the sentiments that lay behind the second organized response to the emigration question: the founding of the National Society Against Emigration (Nationalföreningen mot emigrationen) in May 1907. "National" in its title emphasized a widely felt need for the broadest possible coalition of all classes and political viewpoints to confront the common threat. The society was nonethe­less
dominated from the beginning by an inner circle of conservative businessmen, landowners, and intellectuals, above all from the Gothenburg area. Its leading figure was Adrian Molin, director of the society, who focused its activities principally upon support of the Egna hem or "Own-Home" movement, propaganda against emigration, and encouragement of remigration to the homeland. As a spokesman for the "Young Right," Molin polemicized against an alleged gerontocracy that prevented youthful idealism from creating a new Swedish "Age of Greatness." During a visit to the United States in 1910, he expressed his admiration for American optimism and drive and recognized that the Old World had much to learn from the New. Molin's and his colleagues' prescriptions to stem the flow of emigration and for the future of Sweden were nonetheless diametri­cally
opposed to those of Gustav Sundbärg and his liberal circle in the Emigration Inquest. Rather than a modern industrialized and urbanized community, Molin and his supporters envisioned a rejuvenated agrarian society that would be realized by creating the largest possible number of smallholdings. The National Society thus contributed greatly, both financially and morally, to the "Own-Home" movement.16
Molin's and the National Society's national-romantic vision of their country's ideal future is most clearly presented in Svenska allmogehem, edited by Gustaf Carlsson in 1911, which was printed and reprinted in impressively large editions. 'To be Swedish is to be part of Sweden," Adrian Molin wrote in its introduction.
We Swedes, all of us, have our roots in the soil of Sweden. And these roots cannot be cut without doing damage to our soul. . . . And ever stronger goes forth the appeal: back to the land! It is a matter of showing that just as in our fathers' times the soil of our country can provide both a secure and a good livelihood to its cultivators and that it can sustain good and happy homes.17
Because of rising wages for hired farm labor around the turn of the century, many believed—among them Molin and certain of his friends—that large-scale farming was becoming unprofitable and that small family farms, utilizing intensive methods of cultivation, were the way of the future for Swedish agriculture. But more important still: a stable rural population, firmly rooted in homes on land of its own, would remain untouched by seductive temptations from across the sea or from the international socialist and labor movements, which appeared to threaten the very fabric of society.
Despite the notable accomplishments of the National Society, the "Own-Home" movement was administered mainly by the old provincial agrarian economic societies (lanthushållningssällskap), supported by subsidies granted by the Riksdag in 1904, which in practice meant that they encouraged homes primarily for agricultural laborers rather than self-sufficient smallholding farmers. As a private interest group the National Society meanwhile had an undisputed field of activity in publicity and propaganda. Besides Svenska allmogehem, it also published a series of pamphlets and brochures, in addition
t
o sponsoring extensive lecture series directed against emigration throughout the country. The basic message is consistently the same: America is no longer the El Dorado it once was; its economy is stagnating and devastated by repeated crises that cause widespread unemployment and misery; extremely few emigrants nowadays succeed; even so, Swedish Americans persist, through misdirected pride, in boasting about their alleged success and thereby luring others to their ruin, while nothing is heard of the thousands upon thousands who fail; meanwhile the new Sweden offers abundant opportunities for all of its sons and daughters who are prepared to work.18 A number of individual publicists were inspired to direct their own attacks against emigration, and these generally reflect the same arguments. A special case is provided by G. Thyreen, who in 1911 warned against the decline of civilization itself because of Europe's catastrophic loss of pure Germanic blood—of which its Swedish strain was the purest—to North America, the grave of the white race.19
A meeting held at Stockholm's Grand Hotel in January 1907 prepared the ground for the third organized response to emigration: the Society for the Preservation of Swedish Culture in Foreign Lands (Riksföreningen för svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet), formally estab­lished
in December 1908 with its headquarters in Gothenburg. As had been the case both in the Emigration Inquest and in the National Society Against Emigration, the RFSBU also had its dominating personality, Vilhelm Lundström, one-time editor of the conservative newspaper Göteborgs Aftonblad, professor of classical languages at Gothenburg University, and in 1914 a conservative member of the Riksdag. Lundström deplored emigration as deeply as either Gustav Sundbärg or Adrian Molin, but if it was Sweden's tragedy, he also regarded it as the fatherland's great opportunity. As he later expressed it, he was seized by
an overpowering sense of duty to preserve, in a national sense, what could be saved, to seek to turn to account all that noble Swedish material which, even if no longer here at home in the fatherland, nonetheless still belongs through blood and race, through language and heritage, to the Swedish nationality.20
The solution he found in what he called the "All-Swedish idea." Beyond the limited Swedish national state there existed "another, greater fatherland," consisting of everyone of Swedish race, culture, and language throughout the world. Of a total nine million Swedes, Lundström maintained, three million lived outside of Sweden. The ancient Swedish minorities across the Baltic—in Finland, Estonia, and even Gammalsvenskby in remote southern Russia—provided moving examples of loyalty toward their cultural heritage for the Swedes of the more recent diaspora, above all for those in America. Swedes throughout the world should join together in one great union based upon common material and cultural interests.
The union of all Swedes [Allsvensk samling]—does it not ring forth like a fanfare? . . . It is a fanfare for struggle and con­quest.
For the rallying in spirit of the greater Swedish father­land
once again is a conquest, surely the last old Sweden can make. But also the greatest it has ever made.21
V i l h e l m Lundström, 1 8 6 9 - 1 9 4 0 . ( C o u r t e s y of Riksföreningen S v e r i g e k o n t a k t , Göteborg.)
The similarity between Lundström's all-Swedish ideal and Carl Sundbeck's proposal in 1904 concerning a new, non-political imperialism is unmistakable, even though Sundbeck, who soon found other outlets for his restless crusading spirit, does not appear to have played any active role in the RFSBU. A similar presentation of Swedish Americans as examples for those in the homeland of venerable, time-honored Swedish values and characteristics, appears in the account that Gothenburg pastor Per Pehrsson wrote of his visit to the United States in 1910 on behalf of RFSBU, to congratulate Augustana College and Seminary—that bastion of Swedish culture on the banks of the Mississippi—during the fiftieth anniversary of their founding. This visit resulted the same year in the establishment of a Swedish-American offshoot, the Society for the Preservation of Swedish Culture in America, later renamed the Swedish Cultural Society of America.22
All three of the organized responses to the emigration question at the beginning of the twentieth century showed, despite their obvious differences, certain common characteristics. All considered emigra­tion
to be deplorable, even if Lundström and the RFSBU concentrated on utilizing this fait accompli to Sweden's and the Swedish nationality's advantage. No insurmountable contradictions separated the three lines of thought, and a number of leading personalities were associated with more than one of them. All belonged to the conser­vative
or liberal political camps, which at the same time opposed emigration while admiring America as a land of progress. All were at least as concerned about socialism and the labor movement as they were about emigration. As opposed to both, they upheld their own ideal of a "national awakening" based upon the patriotic rallying of all classes of society around the blue and gold banner. Both emigration and socialism threatened this vision of the future, but its proponents cherished certain hopes that the one evil might counteract the other if only a sufficient number of energetic and capable Swedish Americans, possessing both capital and useful skills, as well as exemplary American ideas of individual success through hard work, could be persuaded to return to their old homeland and thereby strengthen the forces of social preservation.23
What came of the three organized responses' efforts? The Emigration Inquest lasted only for a limited time, until its task was completed. The result was a hefty report, augmented by twenty weighty supplements, which came out between 1908 and 1913, when the commission was dissolved. These documents contain a series of specific recommendations, mainly economic in nature; but these became largely irrelevant after the outbreak of World War I already in 1914 and thereafter when the American quota laws of the 1920s reduced emigration to a mere trickle.24 Nonetheless, the total impression created by the Emigration Inquest, in particular upon politicians, public officials, and shapers of public opinion, must have been considerable with regard to Sweden's future development. And indeed Sweden has followed the guidelines that Sundbärg and his colleagues espoused: modern industrialization and an advanced social welfare system. Meanwhile the inquest assembled an unparalleled mass of documentary material with a wealth of statistical data for research on Swedish life and history around the turn of the century. Undoubtedly this has played a significant part in creating a strongly statistical tendency within Swedish historical scholarship in our own time.
The National Society Against Emigration reached its peak in 1917 during World War I, when it counted nearly 16,000 members and had offices and "Own-Home" associations throughout the country. With declining emigration, its membership fell off rapidly, until only some 2,000 remained in 1925. It then changed its focus and name to the Society for Homes in Sweden (Sällskapet hem i Sverige), which now was devoted entirely to real estate transactions, still under Adrian Molin's direction.25 There meanwhile remains the question of the National Society's effectiveness between 1907 and 1925. Its propagan­da
activities, which far surpassed in scale all that had been done previously in that regard in Sweden, must have had a considerable total effect by criticizing America and emigration as such, while holding forth the vision of a more attractive future in the homeland, even if it could stir up strong reactions both in Sweden and in Swedish America. This cannot, of course, be measured. Meanwhile, one may ask, as the journalist M. V. Wester did in 1913, whether the National Society ought not to have concentrated entirely upon this side of its program. Wester maintained that its leadership, unfamiliar with practical farming, underwrote the purchase of many homes and smallholdings that soon proved to have been poorly planned and infeasible, which led to further emigration. Through its involvement in land sales Wester maintained, "idealism suffers seriously and the ['Own-Home'] movement becomes somehow artificial."26 It may nonetheless be asked whether the National Society's land transactions still did not serve their purpose to the extent that they at least kept a sizable number of potential emigrants in Sweden until emigration no longer seemed a suitable option and the homeland could offer better alternatives. By the time World War I broke out in 1914, the Society for the Preservation of Swedish Culture in Foreign Lands was the least developed of the organized responses. Its activities concerning the United States thereafter encountered repeated misunderstandings and conflicts. These resulted largely from Vilhelm Lundström's inability to grasp fundamental differences between the highly admired Swedish folk elements across the Baltic, with their ancient traditions of cultural preservation, and the Swedes who of their own choice had emigrated to North America, where similar traditions were weak and assimilation relatively easy. His constant appeals for the unwavering maintenance of the Swedish heritage and language, even in the midst of America's involvement in the war, seemed nagging and tiresome to Swedish Americans, who also reacted adversely to the kind of cultural imperialism that these appeals seemed to express. In time Lundström became more tolerant, especially after he himself finally visited America in 1938 and encountered the unforced, natural Swedish culture that despite all still lived on here.27
Nevertheless it was the RFSBU that survived longest among the organized responses from 1907; it lives on today, since 1979 under the name, the Society for Contact with Sweden (Riksföreningen Sverigekontakt), with its headquarters still in Gothenburg. From the beginning, it aimed not only at supporting Swedish culture among the Swedes outside of Sweden but also at spreading knowledge of Swedish language and culture to a broader cultivated public throughout the world. In this respect the RFSBU has had a consider­able
impact over the years, supported in the United States by such organizations as the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, both founded in 1910, as well as in Sweden by Sverige-Amerika Stiftelsen (the Sweden-America Foundation, 1919), Utlandssvenskarnas förening (the Society of Swedes Abroad, 1938), and Svenska Institutet (the Swedish Institute, 1945). Familiarity with literary Swedish and higher Swedish culture can hardly have been ever much greater in America than it is today, and this among a broader and by no means entirely Swedish-descended public.
Following a final wave of nearly 25,000 emigrants in 1923, mainly reflecting the restraints of the war years, Swedish emigration declined to relatively insignificant numbers. From the mid-1920s the Swedes have rarely even filled their national quotas set by Congress. From the Depression of the 1930s until 1946, return migration to Sweden was far greater than emigration. Since then they have more or less balanced out.
As the Great Migration drew to a close a new view of it became evident in Sweden. Now, when it no longer represented a threat, it could be hailed as a heroic episode in the history of the Swedish people. Just as the vanishing Wild West was glorified in America, the fearless Swedish pioneers "over there" became a partially still living legend. This new appreciation, echoing the Swedish American Enander and the Swede Sundbeck, is manifest in Archbishop Nathan Söderblom's and his wife Anna's accounts of their visit to America in 1923 as well as in the handsome collaborative work, Svenskarna i Amerika (The Swedes in America), brought out in two volumes in 1925-26 by Karl Hildebrand and Axel Fredenholm. The same tradition was carried on by Albin Widén and Nils Jacobsson during the 1930s and reached its solemn apotheosis during the celebration in 1938 of the 300th anniversary of the founding of the New Sweden colony, with official Swedish representation headed by Crown Prince Gustav Adolf.28 It eventually received its most striking expression in fictional form in Vilhelm Moberg's epic tetralogy of novels Utvandrarna (The Emigrants, 1949-1959). Almost immediately thereafter, around 1960, academic research on the Great Migration began at Swedish universities, particularly at Uppsala with Professor Sten Carlsson in the lead.29
Meanwhile, in America, as the Swedish-born immigrant generation has largely disappeared, the Swedish connection has become ever more a matter of ethnicity by choice, a concept officially endorsed for the first time by the 1980 United States census, in which every individual was free to indicate the ethnic group with which he or she felt most closely associated, irrespective of other ancestry. There nonetheless still remains a surprising amount of the old ethnicity, as well as a warm attachment to the old homeland, among the descen­dants
of those who were part of the great Swedish emigration that aroused such strong reactions in the old homeland.
NOTES
1 George M. Stephenson, ed. and trans., "Documents Relating to Peter Cassel and the Settlement at New Sweden," Swedish American Historical Bulletin, 2:1 (1929), 16-18; Nils Runeby, Den nya världen och den gamla. Amerikabild och emigrationsuppfattning i Sverige 1820-1860 (Uppsala, 1969), 203. Cf. Peter Cassel, Beskrifning öfver Norra Amerikas Förenta Stater (Westerwik, 1846), included in both the original Swedish and in English translation in Stephenson, "Documents." 2 See Runeby, Den nya världen och den gamla. Cf., for ex., also C A. von Nolcken, "Några ord om Swenska Allmogens utflyttning till andra werldsdelar," Läsning för Allmogen (Lund, 1855), 37-48; Ph. v. T., "Varningsord till Utvandrare," Läsning för Folket, 25:3 (1859), 286-88; "Warning för Utwandrare," Läsning för Folket, 28:1 (1863), 60-72; Kjell Bondestad, "The American Civil War and Swedish Public Opinion," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 19 (1968), 95-115.
3 Johan Andersson, Amerika eller Sverige? (Kalmar, 1870); Alex. Nilsson, Amerika sådant det är! (Stockholm, 1871).
4 Mauritz Rubenson Skildringar från Amerika och England i bref under hösten 1867 (Stockholm, 1868); Hugo Nisbeth, Två år i Amerika (1872-1874) (Stockholm, 1874); Ernst Beckman, Frän Nya Verlden (Stockholm, 1877) and Amerikanska studier, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1883), I; Jonas Stadling, Genom den stora Vestern (Stockholm, 1883); Isador Kjellberg, Föredrag om Amerika (Stockholm, 1883).
5 W. E. Svedelius, Studier i Sveriges statskunskap, I (Uppsala, 1875), 351-413, esp. 390; Knut Wicksell, Om utvandringen (Stockholm, 1882); Gustav Sundbärg, Bidrag till utvandringsfrågan från befolkningsstatistisk synpunkt, 2 vols. (Uppsala, 1884-85), esp. II, 138.
6 Axel Lindberg, Några betraktelser rörande främjandet af landets jordbruk och hämmandet af emigrationen (Uppsala, 1882); C. A. Sjöcrona, Om utwandringen. Utlåtande afgifvet på nådig befallning (Mariestad, 1882); J. A. Leffler, "Våra jordbruksarbetare med särskildt afseende på den amerikanska konkurensen," Nationalekonomiska Föreningens förhandlingar 1887,49-62, and "Om utvandringen," Nationalekonomiska Föreningens förhandlingar 1890, 49-58.
7 Joh. A. Enander, Förenta Staternas Historia utarbetad pr den Svenska befolkningen i Amerika, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1882); Valda skrifter af Joh. A. Enander, I (Chicago, 1892); Joh. A. Enander, "Svensk-Amerikas dag i Norrköping," Prärieblomman 1907, 69-90; Anders Schön, "Dr. Joh. A. Enander. En minnesruna," Prärieblomman 1911, 16-45.
8 P. P. Waldenström, Genom Norra Amerikas Förenta Stater (Stockholm, 1890); see also "C. J. U." [C. J. Malmquist], Hvilket lands folk är månne det lyckligaste? (Örebro, 1894); Vilhelm Nordin, Ur en emigrants anteckningsbok (Stockholm, 1902).
9 August Palm, Ögonblicksbilder från en tripp till Amerika (Stockholm, 1901); P. P. Waldenström, Nya färder i Amerikas Förenta Stater (Stockholm, 1902). Cf. Sigmund Skard, "Amerika i Europas liv," in Lars Öhnebrinck, ed., Amerika och Norden (Stockholm, Göteborg & Uppsala, 1964), 19-20.
10 See, for ex., F. A. Wingborg, Emigrationen. Några erinringar (Stockholm, 1903, and later editions); Några råd till dem som ämna utvandra till Amerika (Göteborg, 1903).
11 Pontus Fahlbeck, "Emigrationen. Dess orsaker och medlen att stäfja den," Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift (1903), 13 pp.; Gustav Sundbärg, Emigrationen (Uppsala, 1906), 23 pp., and Emigrationen II (Uppsala, 1907), 34 pp.
12 Carl Sundbeck, Svensk-amerikanerna. Deras materiella och andliga sträfvanden (Rock Island, Ill., 1904), esp. 34, 92, and Svensk-Amerika lefve! Några tal hållna i Amerika (Stockholm, 1904, esp. 23, 26, 29.
13 See Ann-Sofie Kälvemark, Reaktionen mot utvandringen. Emigrationsfrågan i svensk debatt och politik 1901-1904 (Uppsala, 1972), esp. 182.
14 Emigrationsutredningen. Bilaga XVI (Stockholm, 1911), also published separately as Det svenska folklynnet (Stockholm, 1911). Cf. Kristian Hvidt, "Scandinavian Discord on Emigration," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 25 (1974), 254-63.
15 C. Thornberg, Emigrationsfrågan studerad hemma och i Amerika (Karlstad, 1906), esp. 5-7. 16 For Molin's ideas, see esp. his Svenska spårsmål och kraf (Stockholm, 1906) and Vanhäfd (Stockholm, 1911).
17 Gustaf Carlsson, ed., Svenska allmogehem (Stockholm, 1909), esp. 7,11,14. Cf. Michael Shepard, "The Romantic, Rural Orientation of the National Society Against Emigration," Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly, 21 (1970), 69-83.
18 See, for ex., [T. W. Schönberg], Sanningen om Amerika (Stockholm, 1909); [W. Swanston Howard], När Maja-Lisa kom hem frän Amerika (Stockholm, 1908); [Ernst Lindblom], Per Jansons Amerikaresa (Stockholm, 1909).
19 [M.], Hvad Anders lärde i Amerika (Stockholm, 1907); Carl Bruhn, Stanna hemma! Amerikanska penndrag (Stockholm, 1916); G. Thyreen, Skall jag resa till Amerika? (Stockholm, 1911).
20 "Riksföreningens förhistoria," Riksföreningen för svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet. Årsbok 1909 (Göteborg, 1909), 1-9; Vilhelm Lundström, "Kring svenskar, svenskhet och svensk-minnen i U.S.A," in Till trettioårsdagen 1908 3/XII 1938 (Göteborg, 1938), 8. Cf. Bengt Bogärde, Vilhelm Lundström och svenskheten (Göteborg, 1992); my "Vilhelm Lundström och svenskarna i Väster- och österled," Sverigekontakt (December, 1991), 17,19.
21 Vilhelm Lundström, Allsvenska linjer (Göteborg, 1930), 3.
22 Per Pehrsson, "Svenskheten i Amerika," Riksföreningen pr svenskhetens bevarande i utlandet. Årsbok 1910 (Göteborg, 1910), 1-40.
23 See Nils Runeby, "Herman Lagerkrantz, emigrationen och den nationella väckelsen," Arkivvetenskapliga studier, 3 (1962), 63-84.
24 See Franklin D. Scott, "Sweden's Constructive Opposition to Emigration," Journal of Modern History, 37 (1965), 316.
25 See Paul Bergholm, Nationalföreningen mot emigrationen 1907-1917 (Stockholm, 1917); Scott, "Sweden's Constructive Opposition," 318-19, 331-32.
26 M. V. Wester, Småbruksrörelsen pr eller mot emigrationen (Stockholm, 1913), esp. 22-26.
27 George M. Stephenson, The Religious Aspects of Swedish Immigration (Minneapolis, 1932), 449-57; Lundström, "Kring svenskar."
28 See Nathan Söderblom, Från Uppsala till Rock Island (Stockholm, 1924); Anna Söderblom, En Amerikabok (Stockholm, 1925); Karl Hildebrand & Axel Fredenholm, eds., Svenskarna i Amerika, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1925-26); Albin Widén, Svenskar som erövrat Amerika (Stockholm, 1937); Nils Jacobsson, Svenska öden vid Delaware 1638-1831 (Stockholm, 1938).
29 The Uppsala group's research is summarized in Ann-Sofie Kälvemark, ed., Utvandring (Stockholm, 1973) and in Harald Runblom & Hans Norman, eds., From Sweden to America: A History of the Migration (Uppsala & Minneapolis, 1976). Cf. H. Arnold Barton, "Clio and Swedish America," in Nils Hasselmo, ed., Perspectives on Swedish Immigration (Chicago & Duluth, 1978), 3-24.
This article appeared in
Studie
r i modern historia tillägnade Jarl Torbacke den 18 augusti 1990 (Stockholm, 1990), 13-25, under the title "Svenska reaktioner till utvandringsfrågan kring sekelskiftet." It is here translated by the author with only a few minor revisions.